Getty Images
The American right hasn’t been this giddy since the tears started flowing at the Javits Center on election night in 2016.
For months, President Biden’s manifold failures as commander-in-chief have given Donald Trump an edge in this year’s rematch between the two.
Last month’s debate not only turned Trump into the prohibitive favorite, but raised the possibility that Biden might be enough of a drag on his ticket to bring the rest of the Democratic Party down with him.
But as it begins measuring drapes and preparing for its likely return to power, the GOP would be wise to glance across the pond to take heed of two cautionary tales.
Before Sunday’s legislative election, National Rally — France’s populist right-wing party headlined by the controversial Marine Le Pen — had champagne on ice after winning big in the first round of voting.
In the end, though, a leftist coalition ended up popping that cork: National Rally earned the most votes, but Jean-Luc Melenchon’s New Popular Front took the most seats.
Meanwhile the center-right Republicans — who have been reeling ever since their 2017 presidential candidate flamed out and allowed Le Pen to become the de facto leader of the French right — lost 25 seats.
Despite persistent dissatisfaction with the status quo in France, Le Pen fails, time and time again, to deliver the sweeping electoral victory expected of her.
American conservatives must never make the same mistake, allowing the unviable fringe to hijack the GOP from the center-right coalition that’s long been at its helm.
In the United States, Trump’s charisma and lack of ideological center — as well as the Democrats’ abundant weaknesses — have insulated him from the charges of extremism that have attached so firmly to Le Pen.
But if he retakes the presidency unburdened by the need to consider his political future, he could justify such a tag and do lasting damage to the Republican brand.
At a recent campaign rally, for example, Trump praised the “amazing” Laura Loomer, a bat-guano crazy, “pro-white nationalism” social-media addict who spends the bulk of her time spreading wild conspiracy theories online.
Meanwhile, Steve Bannon — proud platformer of the alt-right — still boasts of a “direct line” to Trump, despite his flameout during the former president’s first term and his later scheme to defraud Trump’s voter base.
And Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who once basked in the glory of The New York Times’ praise for his 2016 memoir and now hobnobs with the likes of Bannon and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, is reportedly a finalist in Trump’s veepstakes.
If these voices are empowered under a Trump redux, the results could be as devastating as they would be far-reaching — not only hampering Trump’s presidency, but also permanently harming the Republican Party by ruining its claim to represent the center-right.
“Center-right,” however, also cannot come to mean “feckless” — as the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party has come to define it.
The Tories were wiped out last week by Keir Starmer’s Labour Party — but not as a result of the voters’ mass hunger for the watered-down, utopian socialism Starmer advocates.
To the contrary, it’s the consequence of the Tories’ inability to address some of the major issues that its base has been practically begging them to for years.
Immigration, in particular, which YouGov polling found was the second most important issue to voters just a couple of weeks before Election Day.
“The reason that we lost the trust of millions of people across the country is not because we were too left-wing or right-wing, or had this slogan or that slogan,” Conservative MP and ex-Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick observed after the drubbing.
“But fundamentally because we failed to deliver on the promises we made to the British public,” he continued, arguing that immigration was “at the heart” of their defeat.
Holding together a durable conservative coalition, as it turns out, is not about ceding ground to the left, but about being effective enough to neutralize the far right.
As Republicans prepare to take the reins again, they’d best bear in mind the lessons that their European counterparts have taught them — or risk the same fate.
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.